Journal - 2008

McCain Rant #1

A few things occurred to me while I was writing the latest of my "open letter to" series of entries. I was trying to make a point about Dubya vs. John McCain and decided that it didn't fit with that material. It goes something like this...

I'll say this about John McCain. He was either brave or foolish enough to fly his jet plane over people who were shooting at him. It is notably harder to get shot down while flying in the Air National Guard over Alabama. But I didn't want the latter as president and I sure as hell don't want the former. I used to have respect for the man. No one can take away from him what the years in captivity already has. It's the fact that he and his campaign use his POW experience to as a catch all answer to any question.

Q: What about those poor grades in the Naval Academy?

A: It was hard for Senator McCain to focus on his studies because he was worried that he might spend a few years in captivity during an upcoming war.

Q: What about his treatment of his first wife?

A: Her injuries in the auto accident reminded him of his own injuries suffered during his five year captivity at a POW camp in North Vietnam.

Q: What about Senator McCain's penchant for eschewing computers and the Internet?

A: Senator McCain knows what a real net feels like, because he spent five years in a POW camp in Hanoi.

Q: John, why won't you pick up your dirty socks?

A: Because I spent five years in a POW camp after being shot down on a bombing mission.

An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton

GET OUT OF THE WAY. You didn't win the nomination of your political party. You lost fair and square despite your attempts to change the rules. If you really, truly cared about the future of our country, of your political charade-cum-party, you would get out of the way. This isn't about you anymore. It never was. This isn't about who does and does not have a vagina. This is about issues. This is about who will get to nominate supreme court justices. This is about pulling this thing back out of the ditch.

Call off your ill-informed attack dogs. They are acting like spoiled toddlers who didn't get their way. They are making you look bad and their vociferous blathering are jeopardizing the entire election. United we stand, goddammit.

The words I need to hear spill from your mouth tonight as the stage at the Democratic National Convention strains under the weight of your ego are... a vote for Barack Obama is a vote for Hillary Clinton. Roll them around in your mouth. Say them out loud a few times to make sure your cadence is correct. You may feel free to refer to yourself in the third person if it makes you feel better. GET OUT OF THE WAY.

An Open Letter to the "PUMA" Crowd

You are acting like spoiled toddlers who didn't get your way. This isn't about you... it's about all of us. If you fuck this up we ALL run the risk of god knows how many more years of Republicans hacking away at the Constitution. If you fuck this up we'll all have to watch right wing appointments to the Supreme Court erode our ability to live in the manner in which we choose.

Would you honestly sleep soundly at night knowing that a hawk with a storied temper has his finger next to the big red button? You yammer on about a woman's right to choose and yet it seems logical to you to cast your vote for a man who unequivocally opposes that right? You really would rather rebuke the Democrats because your candidate isn't on the ticket? You'd be shooting yourself in the foot. You'd be pissing in your own bed. You'd be shitting where you eat. Are you insane? 8.26.08



That's the Ticket

So, it's Biden, then. Fair enough. Now get out there and take that hill. 8.23.08



Just Do It

Jesus, Barack. Just tell us who your goddamn vice president is going to be. All eyes have turned to you. I haven't been able to get more than 5 feet from my cell phone because I was one of your faithful legion to sign up to receive your fantastical, 22nd century revelation by text message. You have an army of strategists. You're working the crowd... and playing the media like a music box. I get it. But enough, already. Your foot dragging is beginning to become annoying.

I am no stranger to wrangling with myself over big decisions. Just ask my girlfriend. Sometimes the curse of empathy - or the ability to see both sides of the story - is that both sides can at once sound like the right and wrong choice.

Just do it, man. Send. The. Fucking. Text. Message. 8.22.08 12:07pm PDT



An Open Letter to Joe Lieberman

Suck it.

Sincerely,
Joe Armstrong

8.21.08



Veep

It's a Tuesday night. My street is quiet. Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama is about to announce his choice of sidekick. His Chewbacca. His Robin. His Walter Sobchack. His wingman. Sure, everybody knows that the American Vice President is like a little brother at a high school party. Not exactly irrelevant but also not playing quarters on the kitchen table, either.

My choice for VP won't make the cut. Wesley Clark impressed me last time around when John Kerry ended up pissing away his shot at having his face on high school picture rails. Clark is a left-leaning former general who came off downright logical to these peace-loving ears. Obama is a half African American intellectual from Hawaii whose middle name is Hussein. What could be better than to have a militarily experienced old white guy with the all-American last name Clark on the ticket? Clark just seems to balance the exotic-sounding Obama on a bumper sticker. Granted, it might not fit as well with the pastoral Obama logo with the sunrise and all.

But they won't pick him anyway. He was a diehard Clinton supporter, even though he did fall in line when Hillary lost the race. (A side note to all those people that she insists must be heard at the convention next week... SHE LOST. Get a hold of yourselves. You're causing an unnecessary distraction that may cost us the White House. Do you REALLY want to see Roe Vs. Wade go the way of the dodo? How, exactly, does that help your cause as a woman who feels disenfranchised?) The Obama team will pick someone safe. In lieu of my #1 I think I'm hoping for Bayh from Indiana. We sure could stand to have a couple red states list just to the blue side of purple. Obama/Bayh doesn't look as good on a bumper sticker, but I am ultimately more concerned with how it will look in the history books. They need to pick whomever will convince Americans to put them into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue - one of them, at least.

This road has been too long. I think everyone has election fatigue. I know I do, and I follow this shit like a little leaguer stays up reading his baseball cards with a flashlight under his blanket. In any case, we'll all know in the next few hundred hours.

In other election news... McCain has been acting like an asshole. So much for his honorable campaign, eh? I'm not daft. Politics is a dirty business. Perhaps the dirtiest of all. The Republican shit machine is churning out all the same claptrap they always do. And Americans swallow it down like the Mayberry fantasy they all so desperately want to exist. Can you not see? The last 7 years have been disastrous. Compassionate conservatism has us fighting two wars. Dubya's self-tauted status as a "uniter" has left us more divided than anytime since 1860. Outsourcing and a fancy for small government has left us with an unfathomable national debt.

Senator McCain said on Saturday night that the benchmark for being rich was a yearly income of $5 million. He joked at the time that he'd be grilled on that remark... but also he didn't offer a lower, more realistic figure for anyone to grasp. What he did do was offer a figure so far out of reach of so many of his constituents that they took it as the joke that it was. But the joke is on them. And on you. And me.

This election is the opposite of the last one in some respects. I didn't love John Kerry - but I desperately wanted him to win because he wasn't the other guy. It seems that the republicans aren't in love with McCain but they have to stick with their ideology... because they're ideologues. Now is not the time for sticking to one's guns. Now is the time for swallowing pride and fixing shit.

Anna Bug

I have a niece. Three, actually, and one of them is named Anna. Her daddy (my brother, David) and consequently everyone else - calls her "Bug." This isn't her middle name but I suspect that it will stick.

Little Anna just turned one last month. She is a tiny bundle of light and smiles. I have honestly never seen a happier baby. When I was home for Christmas late last year, fully halfway back to zero in her lifetime, she barely even cried the whole time I was there. All babies are precious, but little Bug is something else.

Just over a week ago Anna had been sick for several days. She had been running a fever but was by all accounts sticking it out pretty well. Kids are like petri dishes - they get sick all the time. I got a series of phone calls of increasing concern from Alabama. This went on for a couple days, until I got the call that she was being admitted into the hospital. And this was shortly followed by the harrowing call that she was going in for emergency surgery. David had just started a new teaching job the day she was admitted - as if the situation wasn't complicated enough. When they opened up her tiny abdomen they discovered a pretty serious infection - the unpronounceable name of which was relayed to me by my mother. Mom could pronounce it just fine. I seem to have a knack for forgetting things like that the very second they make it down my ear canal.

I felt so disconnected from the whole thing. My entire family was there to support them and all I could do was call and keep them in my thoughts. I slept with my phone on the night stand. I hoped for the best.

Anna pulled through surgery OK but the doctors couldn't initially ascertain the cause of the infection. They had to strap her down to keep her from pulling her stitches or the tubes running down her throat out. That is an image that I can barely picture without a quivering lip. Days passed and her condition improved little by little. Somewhere along the way the hospital staff figured out that Anna's appendix had burst. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that it had burst days before she wound up under the knife. That tiny little person bore the pain of a ruptured appendix for several days. I've read of adults in the same condition being doubled over in agony to the extent that they were semiconscious.

Little Anna Bug came home yesterday. She has lost weight but her condition is improving. David and Danielle sat that she is trotting, rather than running, around the house as she was before. Children rebound quickly. I'd bet that she won't really ever remember this whole ordeal, and thank heavens for that. Us grownups will remember every agonizing minute, but so far it will be remembered with a happy ending. 8.19.08



Shakin' Shakin' Shakes

OK. Here I am almost 24 hours since yesterday's earthquake and I am sitting in the exact same place doing the exact same thing. The dogs turned out to be fine. As some who had never experienced anything like that before I have spent a goodly amount of time talking and thinking about those 20 seconds. I have also spent a goodly amount of time with a phone in my ear. I wouldn't call the event traumatic but it was a wholly new experience. Those sorts of things happen more infrequently as years pass. Christmas is the greatest thing ever when you're 7 years old. By the time you're 47 you've been through it all before. Not that I am 47, but you get the idea.

The lingering thoughts about yesterday involve a few key points. The primary point is my recollection of the initial boom. It was almost like a crack or snap accompanied by a near-subharmonic hum. I wonder if earthquakes have an overtone series. It would stand to reason that an earthquake's shock waves, which are below the range of human hearing, would have resonances that are above that frequency. Perhaps those overtones are within the range of human hearing. In any case, it was pretty amazing. The closet association I have in my memory was watching the space shuttle launch while sitting on a lawn chair in the Banana River at Cape Canaveral in 1983 or so. The rocket was pretty high in the air by the time the sound of the engines arrived. Even the water in which I was sitting vibrated. The roar it made was a combination of low and high pitches. Sort of like a rumble with a higher-pitched tearing sound. This earthquake, which I've noticed has yet to have been named, was just low and warbly.

Research into what The American Red Cross calls a "Preparedness Kit" revealed some obvious, some not so obvious and some fairly amusing results. First, the amusing. Although I don't doubt their logic for including the sheer amount of stuff that they do, the list is so long that my entire apartment, in essence, is a preparedness kit. I joked that it would take a room the size of my apartment to put all that gear in one place - and since I already have nearly every item on the list somewhere in my apartment - I am basically there. My camping gear alone has nearly everything on the list.

What most concerns me is the potentiality of having my upstairs neighbors' apartment collapse down to the ground floor on top of mine. It would be awfully hard to get to those tongue depressors if I was having to dig through shattered plaster, broken floor joists and all their clothes. Not to mention that the roof of the building would be sitting on top of the pile like the top bun of a cheeseburger. All my things would be somewhere under the patty with the pickles, mustard and onions. Not good.

Everybody in California is more or less playing chicken with fate when it comes to earthquakes. All the news articles since yesterday have pointed out that there is a 99% chance of an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or greater in the next 30 years. I'm not sure which number qualifies as The Big One but perhaps it is like the old pornography barometer. I can't tell you what it is but I know it when I see it. I'll say this... given the exponential nature of the Richter Scale, if yesterday was a 5.4 I want no part of a 6.9. The reality is that the situation is not a matter of if, but of when.

So, when it happens we will find out just how good all those building codes will turn out to have been. Here's hoping that it won't be another case of levies rated for Category 2 in the case of a Category 4 hurricane. I'd rather not find out that a particular quake was .1 stronger than my building happened to be rated by waking up with 2x10s across my forehead. Like Christmas, bigger earthquakes are coming. Paranoia doesn't help but thinking on your feet does.

I am perhaps happiest that yesterday's 5.4 was my first earthquake. It was powerful enough to give me the fear but weak enough to not kill me. The next time it happens I'll have the benefit of experience. The next time it happens I'll have a sated curiosity and can grab my dog and my laptop and get under a table. Who knows... I just might be able to see out of a window from under there. 7.30.08



High Summer*

Back in Illinois this is the period of the summer I've always called High Summer. It is that period after the warmer weather finally arrives and the last echoes of the 4th of July's crack and boom have faded. Summer comes on strong at the outset. Especially in cities where pasty white skin hasn't felt the soothing warmth of the sun since the prior calendar year. As soon as the weather breaks the sidewalks, parks and beaches are swarmed with people shaking out their cabin fever. What about spring, you might say? In Chicago proper, the meteorological influence of Lake Michigan quickly douses any hope of spring being the gentle last breaths of winter. I can recall seeing my breath in the month of June more than once. Easter can bring crocusses or snow shovels. Usually the weather for easter egg hunting is just brown and cold... much like the weather Thanksgiving Day dinner smokers have to face as they step outside. Spring in Chicago is cool and gray.

I was once dating a girl back at college the year after I'd graduated. She was coming up to stay with me for a few weeks before her summer stock theater gig started in some podunk town or other. We spent the morning unpacking the things she'd brought up and then loaded into the car to drive back downstate for her graduation weekend. We were wearing jackets and jeans when we left the overcast city where the skyline looked much as it had for months prior... a large stand of dark buildings partially shrouded by low clouds. The sun came out somewhere south of Joliet and by Pontiac we were feeling quite warm in the car. When we stopped for gas and opened the doors the warm, humid air spilled into the car as if we'd driven into a lake. We were taken aback. It was downright hot. It was summer. It was then that I realized that it had likely been that way for weeks down there - where the towns are slowly sinking into the miles and miles of corn inching upwards towards the sun. Spring in Alabama is a wondrous thing to behold. But that's another story altogether. When summer comes to Chicago it has meaning.

So, as the cardboard fuselages of a million contraband bottle rockets are washed into the gutter by summer storms High Summer arrives. Frisbees are pulled from closets and basements. Weber grills are rescued from the mud and windows are wrenched open. As Bradbury said far better than I ever could, the breathing of the world is long and warm and slow. This is perhaps my favorite time of the year. The initial excitement of milder weather has worn down just a little. Weekends are filled with impromptu barbeques and the long evenings have a way of getting away from a person. You

HOLY SHIT

I just rode out my very first earthquake. I was sitting here typing in a nearly empty office when I heard a boom. A boom that sounded like a mountain being dropped somewhere off to the south... which is where the epicenter turned out to be - in Chino Hills. The boom was followed by what seemed like about 30 seconds of undulating and shaking. My girlfriend checked the National Geological Survey as soon as it was done and said that it was a 5.5 or 5.8. That was the second thought I had as I was walking around feeling as if I was surfing on carpet with the building creaking around me - wondering what size quake I was experiencing. The first thought was "Is this the big one I've been reading about all these years?"

One never really knows now they will react in a situation like that. Somehow I knew after it started that it wasn't big enough to bring down the building in which I was writing. I thought to myself... "Should I grab my laptop and get under the desk?" I sort of froze for a second or two to make sure it wasn't just a big truck or airplane crash nearby. When I started to feel that it wasn't The Big One I did what you are never supposed to do in an earthquake and walked over to the window to see if lamp posts were falling over. Even as I did so there was a voice in my head saying "Do Not Go Near The Window." Curiosity got the best of me. I just had to see. When I looked out I could see that nothing was falling down and that the vertical blinds were moving more noticeably than anything outside. The guy raking leaves on the roof of the building next door was just sort of standing there as we both got shaken and stirred. My heart rate is still elevated these 15 minutes later. The oddest lingering sensation is that I don't trust the ground anymore. That floor over there isn't as stable as I thought it was 33 minutes ago. It can wobble around just like everything else - from the water in the bottle on the desk next to me all the way up to Mount Wilson looking down on Pasadena. The room is still ticking as it settles. I am headed home to check on my dogs.

* Interrupted - I'll have to pick up that story about summer later. 7.29.08 12:24pm PDT



Tit for Tat

Obama said this. McCain did that. I've had to take a little break from the political theater that provides fuel for the 24/365 news machine. I still pay attention, but I am saving my energy for the home stretch which is set to begin any minute, now. For now it's all about the candidates being seen with babies and world leaders. I'm nearly blue in the face from holding my breath hoping that there isn't a new catastrophic terrorist attack or that Obama gets caught with an underage stripper in the bathroom of his private campaign plane. Obama seems to have the edge right now but I flat out refuse to speak too soon. He's been my golden boy all along, but all my hopes for him were couched in hopeful but realistic optimism.

Our assets include the fact that our candidate is better looking, younger and doesn't have the stink of political experience around him. Our liabilities include the fact that he's - oh no - black. Or part black, at least. Depending on how big of an asshole the beholder happens to be this is either an asset or a liability. Another liability is that he's young. Old folks like to elect other old folks and old folks like to vote. Yeah, uh, and then there is his relative inexperience. Our adversaries see this as a problem. They must like the way things have been going.

I guess I can see their point. If I was older, rich and didn't know how to use a computer I'd want things to stay the same as well. The problem is that it's too late. Things have already changed. Clinging to some sort of idyllic post WWII prosperity utopia is futile. And in this I can't really see their point at all. How can we have a guy running the show who doesn't know how to use a goddamn mouse? Oh wait. We already do. So how could it be worse. McCain is just an even older guy who doesn't know how to use The Googles.

We're down to two, now. It's the age old American bullshit scenario of A or B. This old white guy or that old white guy. Only now there's a tic in the works. One of the old white guys is a young-ish black guy. But it's still this or the other. I am in luck because my guy is one of those guys this time around. It is unfortunate that the folks we've elected to drive the boat have us all convinced that it's OK to only have A or B. It means a lot of fighting over the folks at the blunt tip of the bell curve. Because that's where most people's viewpoints lie. Right in the middle.

I guess the good news for guys like me is that the whole scale shifts slightly left with every passing year. There were no openly gay characters on television shows while Nixon was running for office. I'm not even sure there were any when Reagan or Clinton ran. In the summer of 2008 we are at least thinking about these issues as a society. It is pragmatism on a grand scale. There always have been homosexuals. There always will be homosexuals. We can no more fight the sunrise. All of Dubya's ranting about privatizing Social Security bought the farm. All his talk of small government and being "a uniter" has turned out to be a crock. Like him or not he didn't do what he said he was going to do. Which brings me to a little lady called...

Katrina

We are Netflix people. Spike Lee's Documentary about hurricane Katrina and her legacy recently came up in our queue and showed up in our mailbox. This event was a modern day catastrophe and that should go without saying. Everybody should have to watch Lee's documentary. It should be shown in schools whether or not there are any black kids in the class. We failed those people. Americans far and wide hung those people out to dry. All the open arms waiting in Utah, Houston and wherever else those displaced residents of the lower 9th ward wound up cannot replace what was their home. A home is more than a house. Many of those people escaped with their lives and nothing more. How many people didn't even manage to escape with that one precious thing that they cannot get back? We saw them floating in the fetid waters of New Orleans.

I felt badly for the face person Lee chose for the Army Corps of Engineers. Sure, they built inadequate levies, but anyone who knows anything about engineers is that they like to build things well. Ask a Howard Roark-esque engineer to build a 100 foot tall hurricane proof wall around a city and they'll say "Can do. Where would you like me to send the estimate when my drawings are ready?" And that's the tragic flaw right there. Politicians hold the purse strings. That gaunt colonel who Lee put before the camera in his fatigues wasn't a colonel 50 years ago when the levies were built. It isn't that the Army Corps of Engineers aren' t liable. It just sucks that somebody chose to ask them to build a $100 wall for $10.

There are no simple answers for what happened down there. Or maybe there are. If only someone had had the courage to heed the warnings of the scientists and prepared for the inevitable. What the hell did they think was going to happen? They built a city below sea level in hurricane country. What do I think is going to happen in Los Angeles where I live? This whole place is like a pile of gasoline-soaked rags half the year. When - and not if - the earthquake(s) come(s) it/they is/are going to kill people. With destruction and subsequent fires. The most sprawling semi-urbanized area in North America is sitting on cracks in the crust that makes up their bedrock. New Orleans' fate was a matter of time - as is Los Angeles'.

What really pissed me off in the movie was exactly what pissed me off when Katrina came and went. George Bush asked the pilot of Air Force One to descend low enough for him to survey the damage. I've written the following in this very journal before, but I hope that the plane was flying low enough for him to see the thousands of people standing on houses and overpasses flipping him off. And then there was his mother, the blue-haired wife of our 41st president, who uttered a "let them eat cake" statement to the cameras while touring the squalor in the Superdome.

My favorite moment of the film was when a Katrina survivor from Mississippi managed to pay a profane insult forward to Dick Cheney, while the Vice President was touring the damage weeks after the carnage took place. This young man had been managed to get close enough to the Vice President for him hear a familiar turn of phrase echoed back to him... "Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney." This man's balls were obviously larger than the levies.

Cheap Good, Free Better

Such was the mantra of my college days. Still it applies from time to time. However, there is one place where it very much applies.

Craigslist burst on the scene about 5 years ago. I suspect that its origins date back a little farther than that but I'm writing at a location without Internet access (gasp) and I cannot confirm its lineage. I first learned about it in its most mature market because it happened to be the locale of its formation. I was traveling around the country on a sort of walkabout and found myself in Marin County, California. For the geographically challenged, Marin County is the red-wooded peninsula whose soil you touch as you cross the Golden Gate Bridge when headed north out of San Francisco. It was the home of Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia. It is now the home of Bonnie Raitt and countless Subaru-driving rich liberals. It is a beautiful place, as I discovered, nestled perfectly between a world class city and the bounty of California's primary wine region. The weather there is better than in San Francisco, which is saying quite a bit.

From a home base at a friend's apartment in Corte Madera I once set out on an expedition that took me to Yosemite National Park, Lake Tahoe, up to Oregon and back down the 101 all the way back to Marin. Along the way I slept in a tent, ate peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches, hiked to the top of Half Dome, felt the frigid water of Tahoe and inadvertently convinced the staff of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company's restaurant that I was an author visiting to write about their establishment (they comped my tab - thank you!). I also managed to sample IPAs at every brewpub I could find... and I found quite a few. I wound up sleeping in my car on the beach at some state park because I initially thought it was too rainy to set up my tent. By the time I drove back to the gate to find a hotel I was locked in. I spent the night listening to the surf on the beach and wondering how high the tide might rise in my slumber - half expecting to be awakened by the sound of water coming in my open windows. It was so dark I couldn't tell how close I was to land's end proper. I had parked in some kind of parking area but one can never be sure. Northern California, as I came to find, is full of expatriates, redwoods and great beer.

But back to Craigslist. In the days before this online trading post one had to post an ad in the paper if one wanted to sell or buy some esoteric item. Like everything else, the Internet is the perfect medium to foment sub-sub-sub-subgeneres. Want to sell approximately 15, 2-foot tall artificial pine trees? Looking for people to play ultimate Frisbee on Tuesday mornings at 5? Done and done. I have been cleaning out an office for my employer. I had a lot of junky old desks and other office-related accoutrements that I needed to make go away.

I started by selling off the items that had relative value. People would come and wheel and deal with me trying to get a bargain on metal shelving, dirty microwaves, boxes of hanging file folders. Here I am on Monday morning, having posted a FREE STUFF - COME AND GET IT ad last Friday. I received no fewer than 200 responses to my ad, which brings me to my ultimate point. If you want to see some peculiar, bottom feeding examples of humanity, put the word "free" in front of anything. One guy asked me for a screwdriver so he could remove the bulletin boards from the walls. He became less interested when I told him that I would be happy to sell them to him for $100 each - that I might offset the cost that building management would charge me to fill the holes left by the missing screws. One girl said that she was a grad student and she would just love to have the conference room table and would I mind just dropping it off at her apartment? I was laughing to hard to respond. I think that everyone should do this sort of thing once. Just like I think that everyone should take a long Greyhound bus trip once in their life. It helps one understand that some of those people in all of those houses out there are certifiably insane. And you get great fodder for writing as a bonus. 7.28.08



The Truth is (Still) Out There

I have a friend who works for Fox Sports. He does some sort of scheduling of audio engineers and video editors and such. One of the perks of working for a company that owns a movie studio is the free screenings they provide for their employees and their friends. I qualify as a friend. Earlier in the week he called me up to say that they were screening the new X-Files movie on Saturday afternoon and asked if I was interested. "Does the pope shit in the woods?" I replied. I am a longtime aficionado of anything spooky. Not so much ghosts and vampires as they tended to lean towards the mystical - and that was more my brother's cup of tea.

As a kid I worshiped at the altar of the holy trinity of spooky - UFOs, Bigfoot and The Loch Ness Monster. Every time mom took me up to the North Aurora library I would make a beeline for the section where all these books lay in wait for my imagination. I could take you to the exact spot on the shelves even now. I read and re-read every story. I stared at the pictures imagining my own eyes peering through the camera lens that captured those photographs that captured me in turn. My developing intellect needed something to be bigger than the world I was grappling to comprehend. Something needed to be untamed, uncontrollable and beyond the reach of the priests and teachers that filled my waking hours with endless columns of arithmetic and the hubris of human understanding about the universe.

I'd check the books time and time again and work myself into a fervor just before bedtime. So much so that I could never fall asleep because I knew that my bedroom was about to be bathed in an eerie, white light. I was positive that if I slept I would miss the oversized shadow of Bigfoot cast on the window at the foot of my bed. I felt the dichotomy in my bones - that I didn't know what would be worse - if I missed the lights in the sky or actually happened to see them.

Our annual summer vacation to rural Alabama provided a much larger field of play for the objects of my obsession. Bigfoot really could live in the endless pines in a place like Bankhead National Forest. Surely the aliens would fly over those quiet houses. There were no street lights to compete with their anti-gravity engines and fewer people to report the fact that they'd been there at all. Nights were pitch black and the billions of visible stars didn't have to fight Chicago's haze just over the eastern horizon. Riding down Highway 33 in those mountains found me staring at every tree in the headlight's periphery. I knew that I would be the only one able to discern Bigfoot standing among the tree trunks at the edge of the forest.

I would wake to the smell of granny cooking bacon and the sound of adults talking about adult things. Bigfoot, whose graveyard shift gig was over for the night, was likely stretched out in a thicket or cave or something. The UFOs knew better than to show up in the daylight. There was simply too much competition. But my books were still there, just waiting to string me along until dark when my imagination could take over and my young eyes would practically beg a star to shift one way or the other.

Now that I am reluctantly grown I still harbor a low grade fascination with stories of unexplained lights in the sky and the shadows of ape men. Bigfoot seems to have gotten himself displaced by a ceaseless advance of strip malls and mcmansion neighborhoods on the sunrise side of the Mississippi River. Resistance is futile. Oh, he's still out there. My eyes now have a few lines around them from squinting at things like Colorado and Northern California. Having seen what real mountains look like I am confident that he can hold the line. Until they put in the Starbucks on top of Mt. Shasta, at least.

Here we are, going on a decade past the millennium. That Patterson guy fessed up to their fake footage. A couple guys in Scotland woke up from their single malt stupor long enough to let us all down about their grainy black and white film with the castle. Why can't these guys do the honorable thing and preserve the legacies for future generations of kids with overactive imaginations? Isn't it more fun to believe than not?

I jumped at the chance to see the new X-Files flick. I came to the show late - just about the time that it had built up enough of a following to afford its producers and writers more complicated mythology. I had quickly fallen in love with Gillian Anderson... or, more aptly, Dana Scully. I have always found smart girls to be irresistibly attractive. I've always felt that dumb girls are easier to impress, and where is the challenge in that? How could I pass up seeing Ms. Anderson's face 20 feet tall?

This particular sequel wasn't the least bit necessary. The television series and the first movie carved out their niche just as the collective human consciousness was expanding to include the Internet. Suddenly there was a channel for kooks of all stripes. This X-Files movie came years after we last heard from Mulder and Scully. It used to be that all you needed for a good hour of Sunday night television was those two with their cell phones, flashlights, pistols and an urban legend. In the summer of 2008 everyone has an iPhone (or imitator) that they can use to download and read stories from those books I used to check out - right up to and including episodes of the original X-Files series.

I'd read some early reviews of the movie before I went in and the critics were picking the bones. My own expectations were admittedly low. My girlfriend was unabashedly not interested. I'll tell you what - I actually liked it. Yeah, I was a fan of the show. I don't know the names of any of the episodes like those fanboy types. But I always liked the chemistry between the lead actors. They had spooky shit and I had a jones. The movie reviewers took issue with the fact that this movie played out like a longer episode with a bigger budget rather than elucidate on the considerable mythology the show had built up over the years. As for me, I found that tack to be a welcome respite from all that shit. A show that had cut its teeth with multiple layers of conspiracy theories had grown a little thick for me. It was tantamount to having Han Solo also be Luke and Leia's brother or cousin or something. The X-Files - I Want to Believe did play out like an episode... and that was precisely what I wanted to see. Just like the old days. Flashlights and cell phones. And if you do see it... be sure to watch the credits all the way to the end. Fanboys rejoice.

And Then They Probed Me

All the talk of the new X-Files movie got me to puttering around looking up UFO stories on the Internets late last week. My favorite in recent memory is the story of the flying saucer that reputedly hovered above gate C17 at O'Hare International Airport on a November afternoon a couple years back. Those particular ETs must have balls of steel and the patience of Job. O'Hare is widely known as not such a fun place to hang around for us earthlings. I ran across this website looking for information about that story. I wound up spending a couple late night hours over the weekend searching UFO reports from towns I've known and loved on that very site. I got myself spooked enough to feel strange about walking down my hallway in the dark on the way to bed. Just like when I was a kid. It was perfect. 7.27.08



Hangovers Installed and Serviced

Last night was my last night on vacation in Chicago - my hometown. I have often remarked that at this point in my life I can be leaving home and heading home all at the same time. Chicago is what feels most like home to me. I find the cursed humidity quite pleasing. My parents and siblings moved to Alabama when I was in college but I never really lived there. That house smells right. The mix of mom's candles all our things and all those Armstrongs make it feel like it should be home. But it isn't. I spent last weekend in my old stomping grounds in Chicago's western suburbs. Batavia, Aurora, North Aurora, Geneva. Eternal green under forever blue with lazy white clouds. Alot of those places feel like home. Some more than others since the wave of development drowned all the cornfields and turned the woods where I used to play into another damn outlet mall.

My high school reunion was last Saturday night. I live a long way from Batavia High School and because I do my interest in the event was piquted. I am notoriously nostalgic and things like this easily capture me in their gravitational pull.

Whenever I find myself in Chicago it has become a tradition to have a send off evening on my last night in town at The Hopleaf. I have been going to that bar for a long time and although it has grown and expanded Michael Roper - the owner and beer Svengali - took great care to retain its original charm. The PBR drinkers think that we Hopleaf devotees are pretentious. I don't care so much about that because I happen to think that PBR tastes like shit.

Last night was no exception and by 10pm I was sitting at a wooden table surrounded by my best friends - all illuminated in the soft glow of table candles and beer. My attorney and I had had a talk about our goals for the evening. At the time, we felt that it was in our collective best interest to attempt to not close the place - and in this we failed miserably. Not only did we manage to close The Hopleaf, but in doing so found ourselves in a cab headed out to find a bar that stayed open later still. Last night the bar that fit that bill turned out to be the famous Green Mill on Broadway and Lawerence, which any good Chicagoan knows to be a 4am bar.

I had a great time and I wouldn't change a thing. But now I am paying. Not the kind of debt that finds me curled up in the fetal position on the bathroom floor. No sir. I haven't done that kind of damage in nearly a decade and I intend to keep that streak going. But there is still pain in the house of Joe. I'd rate today's hangover at roughly 3.7 out of 10, with the latter number representing the top of the scale and being a state of abject misery. Last night's assault by the present me on the future me is more like a police action than a war. But there are casualties - and my stomach ranks among the most exploited. 7.14.08



Flyover

I am among my people. Sitting on a train headed northward towards Chicago. Out the right side window is a water tower bearing the name of the town of Ashkum. It has an American flag painted on one side and a stick figure drawing of a little boy and girl on the other. The sun is shining and the universe is blue and green and white. The only thing that has visibly changed since my formative years in this area of the country is the roundness of the cars and the gas prices into the 3rd digit per gallon. There are also cellular phone towers but I can't see any of those from my Amtrak vantage point. I am not from Ashkum - nor have I ever been there to my recollection. But it is just like so many towns strewn about the plains of the middle west.

On the train with me this morning is my forlorn girlfriend, whose parents we just left behind on the asphalt beside the train in Effingham. These rural farming communities are truly her roots. Also joining me are a group of what I've determinted to be convicts of some sort. They're a motley crew dressed in white t-shirts, heather gray sweat pants and shoes with no laces. I left the bathroom in the station in Effingham to find them trying to decide whether or not they'd asked me for a cigarette. I'm a dry well in that regard. The rest of the folks on the train are quite unlike the people among whom I live in Los Angeles. Most of them are white and middle-ish class, save for the cadre of convicts, whose racial cross section bears the colors of the byproducts of capitalism.

The woman across the aisle from me has been quilting since we got on the train. She put her swatches away a bit ago and has been reading a large-print book ever since. There are a few students from the University of Illinois headed north for a weekend away from summer classes. Red, white and blue flags and bunting leftover from last week's Independence Day celebrations hang from porches and street lamps in every little town we slice through on our way to Chicago. I can just smell the dew-soaked bottlerocket sticks peppering the lawns of each little town. The men have deeply-tanned necks and the women are tired from getting up in the wee hours to feed babies.

This feels like home at the same time that it feels like some alien land of weeds and puddles. We just passed a highway department storage bin with a geodesic dome roof. I wonder if the guy who has worked in that thing every day for years has any clue who R. Buckminster Fuller was. Maybe he does. Never confuse simplicity for stupidity. They are not the same thing. The people in small towns revel in their lifestyle. Or, like my aging great uncles in Alabama, they don't stop to consider their lives in any fashion other than the fact that they live them. Change comes slowly in this part of America. Sure, there are the cell phone towers. Oh, and the tanning salons as well. It seems that every podunk town has at least one.

WARNING - EXPLETIVE-LADEN TIRADE AHEAD

What the fuck? My pastoral Amtrak experience has been derailed. We've been sitting still in the train just outside of Union Station in Chicago. For forty minutes. Completely still. They've made all manner of announcements about this and that freight train and wrong tracks and other bullshit. I am not going to die or anything, but this is a SERIOUS FUCKING INCONVENIENCE. My friend who has been kind enough to loan me a car for the weekend has been waiting at the station on his lunch hour. I just spoke with him on the phone and he said that they just posted our arrival time as 2 o'fucking clock. It isn't even 1 now and we've been here for quite a while. We were already running late on top of that. What the fuck? The poor conductor has been pacing up and down the aisle. The goddamn Metra trains are careening past us coming and going. The convicts have been wandering back and forth to the bathroom and dining car, which they have ever so kindly reopened. The bathroom on our car is out of toilet paper and the floor is covered in a liquid whose origin I'd prefer not to think about.

I am now in a foul mood because this means that I'll be leaving Chicago in the heart of Friday afternoon rush hour traffic. So much for my motherfucking idyllic public transportation experience. I used to complain up and down about the CTA when I lived here. The trains are slow, erratic and full of unsavory people. Sparks shower down below the tracks as the cars teeter down the serpentine tracks - seemingly on the brink of falling off at any moment. Don't even get me started about the bus lines. And then I moved to Los Angeles where one's transportation options aren't really options at all. You can drive or drive. There is no catching up on reading one's Vonnegut while comuting to work in LA. Traffic can be abysmal at any hour of the day or night - not even counting the usual rush hour gridlock. I've been looking forward to this train ride. I am, after all, writing as I sit here. And maybe that's the problem. I am fucking sitting here. Still, in both senses of the word.

I have left the driving to them and now have plenty of time to think about how long it is going to take me to get out to the western suburbs when I finally reach the borrowed car. I had already been vexed about the fact that we were running late. My girlfriend is on her Internets-enabled phone looking for the phone number to Amtrak world headquarters. She is not renowned for her patience in such situations and I pity the poor customer service rep who is about to be torn a new asshole.

It isn't as if this is the first time this goddamn train has showed up in Chicago. It is a regularly-scheduled regional commuter train. Surely, they knew we were coming. Therein lies the primary problem with trains. It isn't like you can drive around an obstacle. If there is something in the way the show stops dead in its tracks. We have just now begun moving. I think I might like my money back. 7.11.08



Stuck in the Middle

Ever since Barack Obama won the delegate count pissing contest that filled our newscasts for the better part of 6 months back in early June he has been tripping over himself to get to the middle. I knew this would happen but it still smarts to see him courting the juggernaut that is America's overweight, underpaid and over-entertained middle. Granted, we have to get that iceberg moving before it melts underneath their Hummers but it isn't pretty to see our poster boy for dramatic change playing the straight man. Also granted, he's still black and still pushing a blue agenda. It's just that the blue agenda seems more like Panderfest 2008 to these leftie ears. I am a little bemused by all his supporters who thought he wasn't going to do this and are now casting him as just another politcian. Jesus, people. He has been a politician all along. Didn't you notice that he is running for public office? 7.08



Six

That's how many delegates Barack Obama needs to clinch the Democratic nomination for the presidency as of 5pm PDT this afternoon. At least according to CNN.com. The Huffington Post has him holding steady with eleven to go. Either way he is poised to claim the nomination with the magic number of 2118. Rush fans will no doubt note that Obama is currently holding steady at "2112."

I have made no secret of my support for Obama. I have been cautiously optimistic every step of the way and I am still excitedly reserved. Even if he does claim the blue side nomination the real work will have just begun. We've got the whole Vice President choice dog and pony show for both sides. We've got another several months of mudslinging and high stakes salesmanship. I can't say that Hunter S. Thompson would have supported Obama, but he would likely be happy with our chances this time around. McCain has been showing his true feathers like the hotheaded hawk that he is. He has a wicked combover to boot. This alone doesn't mean that he would be a bad commander in chief. It means that he would be a president with the worst hairstyle since James Polk's mullet.

In the time it has taken to pen this tome, Obama has closed the gap to a mere four delegates. Much to the consternation of the aforementioned Rush fans. 6.3.08



Mixed Up

We went into the studio for the first round of mixing the new record last week. LA based mix engineer Ronan Chris Murphy handled the knobs and was patient enough to deal with the two-headed monster of Tyler and I just over his shoulders. I feel like we put that poor guy through the ringer while trying to coax these mixes into the light of day. Ours was one of the last projects to work in what is soon to be the old location of his studio, Veneto West. We laid down basic tracks way back in December of 2006 with Matt Lynch at the mixing desk of an Atwater Village studio called Mysterious Mammal.

Another round of full band tracking followed in February of 2007 and then Tyler and I set to overdubbing. The whole thing could have been done in 12 or 16 weeks working like "normal" musicians. And by normal I mean if we'd had the ability to work on everything full time instead of scheduling around the shit that fills up our days - like medical school, day jobs, dogs, girlfriends, fiances, buying cars, holidays, showering, eating, etc. And then there's paying for everything. My record label, Greentown Records, isn't able to offset recording costs with the windfall from cash cow artists on their roster. Renting Neve mic preamps and vintage compressors costs money. Such is the life of an independent musician.

All in all I am quite proud of what we've done. We pushed the envelope on the time side of the more money/more time continuum. Since we didn't have the money we took the time. I have been working on songs for this record since before my last record came out just after the turn of the millennium. (Egads.) There were some detours along the way. Girlfriends came and went. Friends and siblings had babies. My Chicago band imploded and I abandoned ship. I wound up hiding out in exile in Alabama. Some assholes decided to make a point by flying airplanes into buildings and in doing so turned the world on its ear. Some other asshole played his hubris card and invaded a country unrelated to the first set of assholes. Assholes all around.

But I'm getting off topic again. Like Walter from The Big Lebowski, none of this has anything to do with Viet Nam, so to speak.

The record is good. It is different than the record I intended to make but it seemed to achieve consciousness somewhere along the way and grow up to be what it wanted to be. Far be it from me to bend it to my will. The louds are louder, the softs are softer and there is quite a bit of real estate in between. Andy Baker's drumming brings a life and spark to my music that it has never had. Jay Lauden's loping bass lines pull Andy's pure rock and roll sensibilities away from the pedantic. Tyler is a fellow guitar tone monger with a penchant for twiddling knobs that far exceeds my own patience for the art. Every piece of gear should have one knob in my world.

So Mr. One Knob learned Pro Tools along the way. I recall the day I set up my new little M-Box and laptop in the living room of my old apartment. I had to read the instructions to learn how to add a fresh, empty track to a new session. I have since gone back to open that session and hear the crickets from the courtyard outside my apartment window along with my test pilot guitar tracks. What I really wanted to do was track the album on 2-inch analog tape but tape has unfortunately become cost prohibitive for guys like me. I ended up using Pro Tools like a glorified tape machine. Funny how a hard drive can become the single most important thing in your universe.

Also contributing to the new record were some old friends. Most notably, Chicago's Daryl Coutts on his 1958 Hammond organ and a little piano. His playing is brilliant, as always. Definitely worth my putting the mobile in Molly's Mobile Studio by dragging the operation back to the Central Time Zone to track him and our trio of chicks in black dresses Ava Fain, Anne Hamilton/Katzfey and Crescent Tay Prah. Chicago conspired to make tracking the girls a complicated operation. Anne called me while I was waiting for my connecting flight in Memphis to say that her condo association was demolishing and rebuilding their back deck on the day we'd set up our vocal tracking session. Calls to my other friends in the city didn't get me anywhere because the city was digging up the park across the street from option 2 and contractors were building a new condo building just outside my attorney's place. Old crony Tone Loc would have been a great option as he was already loaning me mic stands and headphones but he was moving that weekend as well. Ava came through in the 11th hour by offering my choice of rooms in the Leo Burnett Building where she works. I ended up tracking the girls singing in a cafeteria on the 20-something-th floor. The weather was blessedly good while I was in town, my attorney plied me with Two Hearted Ale and I got good tracks. Everybody wins.

Back in Los Angeles, I got Wurlitzer, piano and vocal contributions from Darice Bailey, more chick singing from Suzanne Spinoza and an ace in the hole back up vocal from the Broken West's Brian Whelan. Collegiate buddy and all around good guy John Mezzano happened to be in town on business and I roped him into laying down some percussion between pints of IPA. Alison Ewing overdubbed her violin enough times to make a song sound like an orchestra along with Craigslist gem Shirley Hunt on multitracked cello. Shirley turned us onto violin artisan Stirling Trent who came in to retrack some parts when an earlier session didn't work out. Congratulations to Shirley and Stirling on their Master's degrees.

I did my usual I'll-play-whatever-I-can-find trick by contributing lead vocals, harmony vocals, acoustic, electric, Nashville strung, 12-string and baritone guitars, mandolin, harmonica, accordion, percussion and chord organ. I also spent countless hours editing tracks and wrestling with Pro Tools. Many thanks go out to my engineering wingman, Tyler Macy. His gear made up a good part of Molly's Mobile Studio for this project and his ears kept things sonically legitimate. I am happy to see these songs grow up and get out into the world. They'll be yours pretty soon. Enjoy them, feed them and treat them well and they'll be good for a lifetime of entertainment.

Gray in LA

Today is May 23rd and it is raining in Los Angeles. I am not complaining, as gray skies in Los Angeles mean that weather is actually happening. Those who do not live in the so-called City of Angels know that May 23rd is pretty late to be seeing raindrops and gray skies. Locals who have been here decades longer than I are saying that this is the latest rain they've ever seen. You see, once the rains taper off in the spring out here they don't return until after Halloween has come and gone and we are making plans for the year's holiday light spectacle. I moved out here because my soul needed some unabated sunshine so I am more or less fine with that situation for now. I am staring out a window at skies that would look just fine behind the skyscrapers of Chicago. You know the Chicago weather mantra - if you don't like the weather, stick around. Out here, a more appropriate statement would be - if you don't like the weather, what the hell are you doing here? There aren't many reasons beyond that to put up with this overcrowded mess.

Go Barry

My favorite Hawaiian cum Illinoisan, Barack Obama has been kicking ass and taking names. I have been following Acts I and II of 2008's political theater with hopeful uneasiness. I haven't been commenting about the roller coaster in here for two reasons. 1. Because I have been finishing up a new album and that process is taking up all my "free time and disposable income." Because I have so much of both of those. And, 2. Because I didn't want to get my hopes up about my Golden Boy. He's our great, half white hope. I believe that America desperately needs Barack Obama. Not because of what he will do, but because of what he will inspire us to do. I remember asking my buddy Jeff how to pronounce Obama's name when it started showing up on election signs in my hometown of Chicago. I've been following his career arc ever since. It's unbelievable - in him we have a politician who opens his mouth and - holy shit - things that make sense tumble out.

I didn't want him to run this time around, but I decided long ago that I'd support him if he did. I am still getting over my depression from the results of the last presidential election. But Obama stood on Lincoln's steps and filled my head with hopeful but trepidatious optimism And now look where we are. My golden boy is poised to get the nomination. Every step along the way Obama won when he needed to win. If he hadn't won in Iowa his boat would have been sunk right next to the dock. If he hadn't held his own on Super Tuesday his chances would have dwindled to much of nothing.

Hillary has held her own. Considering the fact that every Commander in Chief since 1988 has had either the surname Bush or Clinton she dropped the Rodham like flaming potato and rode her ambition to the bank. What has turned me from Mrs. Rodham Clinton was how she has made high art out of changing the rules when she feels she's not winning. I don't have any issues with having a woman running the show. I suspect that a lot of Hillary's supporters support her simply because she's a woman. I get it. I really do, but what matters most to me are candidates' positions on the issues. I don't care what color they are or whether or not they pee standing up. Look at it this way... what if you could read and assess the three remaining candidates by reading about their platforms without knowing about whom you were reading? I think a lot of people, red, blue or purple would realize that all three have good ideas. Conservatives would realize that Obama opposes gay marriage without getting all riled up about the color of his skin. Female Clinton supporters just might (maybe) not let gender cloud the issues.

What is happening is historic. At least on the progressive side of the fence. The Republicans are running - you guessed it - a rich, old white guy. The Democrats' best man for the job will either be African American or not even a man at all. In some aspects, we can't do any worse than what we have now. My disdain for the policies of the current administration is storied. My attorney thinks that whoever gets the job next is out and out screwed. I am inclined to believe him to a point. However, we've got to try. What is the point if we don't? 5.23.08



Paw Paw

It's funny how your name changes over the course of your life. Donald Freeman Armstrong started out as "Don." I'm pretty sure that somewhere along the way to "Dad" there was a transitional period where he was known as "Son of a Bitch." In the southern states, fathers are called "Daddy" and it is pronounced more like "Deeddy." After a couple decades of being known as "Daddy" to a goodly number of children he acquired the title of "Granddaddy." I think it was my cousin Herbert whose young mouth hadn't gotten the feel of too many words yet who mangled the word Grandpa and put it back together as "Paw Paw." And that's how I came to know the man that was my grandfather. I don't recall ever calling him anything else. His wife and my grandmother, Jewell, called him Don and Daddy and then Paw Paw - and more than likely Son of a Bitch at one point or another along the way. He was all those things and so much more and now we all have to figure out how to get along without him.

Paw Paw passed away in April. He had been in failing health since I was starting college. He bounced back from at least one stroke over the years and survived a good while after his kidneys gave out - loathing the constant trips to the dialysis clinic. He stuck around long enough to look upon no less than 14 great grandchildren (and counting). He dispensed wisdom in the manner of a traditional southern male - with short bits of sage advice carefully placed within hours of keeping his thoughts to himself. I always wanted to hear more stories about the old days and I suppose that I'll never get enough. Like John Mellencamp said, there is nothing more sad or more glorious than generations changing hands. By the time most people figure out what a treasure their elderly relatives are it is too late. I managed to figure it out in my own and spent as much time with him as I could. Except for a short period a few years back I always lived far away from Paw Paw. When you're young there are always important things to do. I thankfully learned that spending time with Paw Paw trumped nearly all of those things.

Spending time with Paw Paw meant a good deal of sitting in silence. He was tired and weak and couldn't see or hear all that well. I learned to compensate for those things by writing larger on his handmade birthday cards, speaking more slowly than my normal, rapid midwestern cadence and with a louder tone. And by simply letting him speak when he felt he had something to say. College football is as big a religion as any in his home state of Alabama and when football season arrived the aforementioned silence was broken with the sound of the TV filling his wood-heated basement. In terms of stature he was not a large man and the years whittled him smaller still. When the brown and gray Alabama winter came, a good fire kept his basement around 90F and that was fine with me. I have always had an aversion to cold weather. He was still mostly silent but I didn't know that televisions went that loud. I would sit with him and Granny and we'd watch whatever game Paw Paw deemed to be the most interesting. In 63 years of marriage I don't think that Granny ever really figured out the rules but that somehow made the experience more endearing. She was there to be with him. I was there to be with him. And now I miss him.

Paw Paw's last morning was a good one. His doctor had adjusted his medications to help him sleep more soundly. He awoke saying that he'd had his best night of sleep in years and made his way to the breakfast table where Granny had been serving him breakfast since time immemorial. He always drank his morning coffee out of a saucer. I always wondered to myself whether this was to help it cool or because he just liked it that way. I never did find that out and I am content to let it remain a mystery. Paw Paw was in a great mood and was enjoying his breakfast. Granny and his youngest daughter, Donna, were there with him when he slumped over right at the table. Donna is a registered nurse who lives in San Antonio and she'd taken time off to help her mother take care of Paw Paw. Paramedics were called and they all managed to get him into bed when they arrived. They said that they thought he'd had a massive stroke and it became clear that the end was likely near.

His seven children were summoned and all got a chance to be with him. I received an early morning call on a Tuesday - the kind of call that reminds you that good news always sleeps until noon. Alabama is two hours ahead of California and early can come pretty early when the news from home isn't good. He wound up passing on in the wee hours of the following day and I was on a plane less than twenty four hours after that. My sister was among those with him when he took his last breath. She told me that she would tell me about how it happened when I was ready, but I haven't been yet.

Alabama during high summer is hot. Cicadas and tree frogs fill the forest with a never ending echo after nightfall and the heat doesn't wane with the setting sun. To me, my visits to Alabama in the summers of the 1970s was like a 12-hour car ride back to the 1950s. Paw Paw wore cotton coveralls with his glasses in his breast pocket and rattling change at his hips. Once, during the bicentennial year, Paw Paw and great grandpa made me a walking stick with special 1976 quarters set into the handle. One in each side for heads and tails. It was just like the ones that they used to walk and to poke my ribs except shorter in order to accommodate my smaller stature. Paw Paw was all too eager to use that jingling change on trips in his pickup down to Wren - a town disguised as a crossroads with a service station. The worn hardwood floors would creak below my knobby knees and tennis shoes. Sliding back the tops of the metal refrigerators revealed a young boy's mother lode in the form of soda pop - all Coke to Alabamians regardless of the brand - and what I came to crave the most - popsicles. A sortie to Wren to buy gas for the tractor was merely an excuse to pile into his truck and head off the mountain on Highway 33. Older grandkids like me got to ride sitting on a wheel well in the back and I'm sure that my mother shudders when she thinks of that to this very day. Paw Paw would patiently talk with the staff while we carefully selected our sugar fix for the day. A candy bar, a small pile of hard, wax paper-wrapped Double Bubble and a nectar-sweet bottle of pop. Or, for me, a popsicle instead. There was cherry, lime, grape, orange and my father's favorite to this day, banana. They were simple - two sides and two sticks, meant to be broken in half in order to be shared or bartered for gum with a younger sibling or cousin. We'd deliberate over our choices and then set them on the counter underneath Paw Paw's gleaming dentured smile. One summer Paw Paw noticed my proclivity for frozen confectionaries and started calling me The Popsicle Kid. Now that I'm older and closer to his age than my age then and summer settles into a warm, humid languor I still buy popsicles. And I still love my Paw Paw. I'd give my right arm to have that walking stick now.

In memory of Donald Freeman Armstrong from The Popsicle Kid - April 2008



April Fool

We're all fools, as far as I can tell. Some are bigger fools than others. I can certainly vouch for my own level of foolery. The more I learn, the less I know. Perhaps this is the essence of wisdom. Wise men know that they don't know everything. I suppose that wise women follow suit. I don't have time for a suitable April Fool's prank this year. Unless, of course, I am an unaware victim of one as I write. Some might say that life is the greatest and cruelest prank of all. 4.1.08



Everything Sucks

Everything sucks now. Ok, not everything everything. But most everything. Everything you're not willing to pay a premium for, at least. Case and point...?

I have been a lifelong advocate of stand fans. They're like tabletop fans except they have some sort of base, usually in the shape of an "X" or a big disc, and some sort of stand with an adjustable base. You buy them at your local big box retailer and you take them home and dump the contents on your living room floor. There is usually more styrafoam and plastic than anything in there, and that, unfortunately, includes the component parts of the device which will eventually strain to keep you cool at night.

With a little bit of luck and a general level of engineering aptitude you might be able to cobble the thing together such that it vaguely resembles the picture on the box... sans the picturesque backyard scene that exists in that neverneverland that people who work in marketing think your idyllic backyard should look if mosquitoes and annoying neighbors didn't exist.

The genesis of this diatribe is sitting on the floor of my bedroom a mere four feet from my bed, where I am currently diatribing. The silver-ish sticker reads WINTAIR. I can't be certain how long I've had it but if I were a betting man I'd say that it is less than 3 years old.

I don't expect much from this fan. For my investment of $40 I expect the fan blades to spin at the speed corresponding to the button or switch that I engage at a time of my choosing. I also expect it to turn off when I defeat the switch same. Nearly all these things have some sort of recirculate option which, when engaged, causes the fan to slowly cycle from left to right while fan blades spin all the while.

What I don't expect is to have to manually remove the cheap-ass wire frame around the cheap-ass plastic blades and give them a hand start when I want a little artificial wind. As if it was some sort of World War I ear biplane or something. This is the honest truth. I'm less than 5 years into this piece of shit's life cycle and I already have to pull the "Contact!" rigamarole when I want it to do what I paid its manufacturer to ensure that it does, which I might add, isn't much. It's that part about spinning blades and all.

I am not an old man, but I swear to god that I have noted a discernable decrease in quality in nearly every given item in the menagerie of machines originally designed to make my life easier. Case and point... this fucking fan.

Obamania

I've been following the career of Barack Obama since his signs started showing up around my hometown when I still lived there. Born in Hawaii from an American mother and African father, Barry - as he was known in his formative years - wound up attending college for a spell at Occidental College in the Eagle Rock area just north of Los Angeles. Occidental is maybe 3 miles from my apartment as the crow flies. Seeing signs with the notably non-Polish name Barack Obama around town was a bit unorthodox in a city like Chicago. True, it is a melting pot and many ethnicities are well-represented buried back there under the snow drifts. But a name like Barry Ovaninski might not have piqued my interest back in my Chicago days. But Barack Obama was memorable. And here we are a scant few years later and he's the by-a-nose frontrunner on the blue side of the presidential primary race.

Over the years he earned my respect a bit at a time. I've read his books. I've heard his speeches. He may not be our native son but he is our hometown boy just the same. Granted, I am a Chicago expatriate but that is largely because of the weather. I very well may be back someday in the land of thunderstorms, lightning bugs and wearing shorts when it's 50F in the month of March. Not today, but someday. After all, it is a balmy 27F in Chicago as I write this.

When I heard the first rumblings of Obama considering throwing his name into the hat for a presidential nomination in 2008 I had to make a choice. I felt as if he - and we - might be better served if he held off a bit. Between my attorney's theory that the next president is a de facto patsy who will be left holding the bag of a faltering economy, a wildly unpopular and mismanaged war and a Cubs-worthy record in foreign affairs and the fact that he really was a bit new at the game of big league politics I was convinced that he should let someone else pick up the pieces this time around.

On the other hand I desperately wanted a republican out of the white house. More right wing judiciary appointments would cast a pall over any form of actual progress in our country. We've spent 7 years and counting going backwards. Incidentally, the Dubyaville countdown ticker on my Apple Dashboard reads 332 days, 18 hours, 5 minutes and 40 seconds. Americans are starting to realize that they were hoodwinked.

I want a democrat at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue because I would rather hammer a democrat on the issues than a republican. And mark my words... I will be relentless. I long to criticize a donkey. They're all more or less republicrats anyway.

Which is why I support Barack Obama. I decided that we need new blood instead of the tired old guard this time around. Experience counts for a lot, but there are times in life when you have to trust the next generation with their own future. I'll feel a little badly for Hillary, provided she gets bested by Obama. Normally, I'd be gung ho for a female president. Ms. Clinton is the best shot the smarter gender has as of yet had to have one of their own sitting in the big desk behind the eagle on the floor. But this time... in 2008 and beyond... we need someone to set a hopeful tone. Someone to inspire US - the Americans who most of the working and paying and living and dying in this country to be the best version of ourselves. Someone to inspire actual change.

The president can't make us do anything, but he or she can inspire us to do it ourselves. Kennedy set us on a course for the moon. FDR did us so right that no nominee gets more than 8 years to do his or her thing. Go read about Obama. Listen to what he has to say. Make up your own mind. Maybe give him a chance to lead us somewhere. 2.22.08



Superman

Today is Super Tuesday here in America. It isn't a holiday, per se, but it is a big day in our political process. Our convoluted voting system dictates that a bunch of states decide which presidential candidate will get their delegates and be their contender in the mudslinging, us vs. them race to be the most important figurehead in our country, and I daresay the world.

The political conservatives are on their way to picking which rich, old, white guy will be their man in this race. The political liberals are picking between a woman and an African American. The actual election is fully 8 months away. We have a lot of mudslinging yet to endure.

I don't particularly care for our two party system. It disenfranchises a lot of people, which, I suppose, is the idea. However, I am at least 50% pragmatist and that means that I will work with what we have at the same time that I'll work to change it.

I won't tell you how to vote. I will only encourage you to listen to the words of the junior Senator from my home state of Illinois, Mr. Barack Obama. I'm sure that if you can find my words here you can find any number of places to see his. 2.5.08



Damn

That year went fast. I have all manner of things I've been writing that I need to post in here but I wrote them in a word processor so I need to square peg them into this web editing software. I'll get to it soon. Welcome to the latter part of the decade. Everyone in? OK, here we go. 1.7.08

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